Chapter 4: The Walk of Shame
The cool air outside the coffee shop did nothing to cut through the heat radiating from their bodies. It was like stepping away from a furnace only to realize you were the furnace. The sidewalk was damp from an earlier sprinkle, patches of oily rainbow shining in the cracks. Mordecai’s first step sent a jolt up his spine, a sharp reminder that his skeleton was now tasked with moving a geography of flesh it was never designed for.
He focused on the bag in his arms. The grease was already bleeding through the paper, creating warm, translucent spots over the muffins.“You good?” Rigby wheezed beside him. He was leaning against the brick exterior, his round face slick and pale.“Yeah. Just… winded.” Mordecai took another step.Then another.It was a process. He had to shift his weight deliberately, his hips swinging wide to accommodate the sheer girth of his thighs. His belly didn’t follow him immediately; it had its own inertia, swinging forward a second later with a heavy, sodden sway that threatened to pull him off balance. He could feel it, a separate, pendulous mass anchored to his front, slapping against his legs with each labored movement. The sound was soft, wet, and intimate.They moved down the block in a slow, pained procession. A woman walking a small dog crossed the street to avoid them, pulling her pet close. A group of kids on bikes stopped pedaling, just staring. Mordecai caught a flicker of their reflection in a store window: two monstrous shapes, swollen and misshapen, their torn tank tops clinging to rolls of pale fat, their steps slow and agonized. For a second, he didn’t recognize himself.That couldn’t be him.That was some sick, bloated thing.
Then Rigby chuckled, a wet, phlegmy sound. “They’re checking out the density, bro. Told you.”
The doubt vanished, washed away by a fresh wave of sweat and the simple, anchoring need to sit down. Just ahead, a bus bench stood under a sickly-looking tree.It seemed like a miracle.“Bench,” Mordecai grunted.
“Yeah.”
Getting onto it was its own ordeal. Mordecai had to turn sideways, lower himself with a controlled collapse, gripping the metal armrest until his knuckles turned white. The plastic seat groaned, buckling ominously in the middle as his full weight settled. Rigby followed, the whole bench flexing downward, bringing them closer together, their expansive hips and thighs pressing into one another. They sat, immobilized, breathing like they’d just escaped a drowning.
For a full minute, there was only the sound of their ragged inhales and the distant city hum. Mordecai’s heart pounded against the back of his tongue.A deep, aching soreness permeated every joint.
Then, the smell from the bags cut through.Grease, sugar, processed meat. His stomach didn’t growl; it clenched, a painful, empty spasm that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with a chemical command.A void opened inside him, wide and screaming.
He looked at Rigby. Rigby was already digging into his bag, his blunt fingers tearing the paper. He pulled out a crushed cheese danish and stared at it, his eyes wide and a little vacant. Without a word, he brought it to his mouth and took a huge, unchewing bite, swallowing it almost whole.Mordecai looked down at his own bag. His hands were shaking.He fumbled with the opening, the simple motor skill made clumsy by his swollen fingers. He extracted the banana nut muffin.The top was smashed, the sugary crust cracked. He brought it to his beak.The first bite was a revelation. Not of taste—it was too sweet, cloying, the banana flavor artificial—but of relief. A physical, profound sense of relief flooded his system, a temporary silencing of the shrieking void.He took another bite.And another. Crumbs cascaded down the front of his gut, catching in the sweat-damp fabric of his tank top.
They ate in silence, two massive figures crammed on a public bench, shoveling food into their bodies with a single-minded, mechanical urgency.It wasn’t enjoyment. It was maintenance.A desperate refueling of a broken machine.
Halfway through his muffin, Rigby spoke, his voice muffled by food.“We should get more. Of the stuff.”
Mordecai stopped chewing. The ‘stuff.’ The thick, chalky liquid from the unmarked bottles in their fridge. The thought of it made something in his gut twist, but the twist was followed immediately by a craving so intense it felt like a thirst. “We’re almost out,” he said quietly.
“So we order more.” Rigby wiped his mouth with the back of a pudgy hand.“The website. It’s easy.”
“What if… what if we take a break?” The words felt dangerous, traitorous.“Just for a couple days. Let our systems… normalize.”
Rigby turned his head, a slow movement made difficult by the lack of a neck.His small eyes were sharp.“Normalize?You heard the doc. Our metabolisms are accelerated.A break would crash them. We’d lose everything.” He gestured vaguely at Mordecai’s body, at the vast, soft expanse of it.“All this work. You wanna go back to being a stringbean? You wanna walk back into that coffee shop looking like you used to?”
Mordecai thought of Margaret’s face.The shock.The pity. Not the admiration he’d wanted. He looked down at his belly, a soft mountain resting on his thighs.He pushed a hand against it. The flesh yielded deeply, his fingers sinking into the cold, doughy fat, leaving indentations that filled back in slowly when he pulled away. It felt foreign.It felt solid.Substantial.“No,” he whispered. “I don’t.”
“Then we keep going.” Rigby said it with finality, rummaging in his bag for the potato salad container. He pried the lid off with a thumb and began eating it with his fingers, scooping up globs of mayonnaise and potato.“We push through the adaptation phase. That’s all this is. Our bodies are just freaking out ‘cause they’ve never been this powerful before.”
Mordecai nodded slowly.Adaptation phase.That made sense. His body was freaking out. The dizziness, the constant sweat, the crushing pressure in his chest when he tried to walk too fast—just side effects.Signs of progress. He finished his muffin, then dug for the egg salad sandwich. The bread was soggy, the filling bland, but he ate it in four large bites, chasing it with a handful of chips.
The food settled inside him like lead, a heavy, uncomfortable ball in the base of his gut. He felt fuller than he’d ever felt, a taut, aching fullness that pressed against his lungs. And yet, the void was still there, whispering, just quieter now.He stared across the street, not seeing the buildings. He saw Margaret’s worried eyes.Eileen’s furious, frightened ones. A chill that had nothing to do with the weather crept through him.
“Rigby,” he said, his voice hollow.“What if they’re right?”
Rigby didn’t answer for a minute. He was licking the potato salad container clean. He tossed it into the bag with a crinkling sigh. “They’re not,” he said, but the usual defiant bluster was gone.It was just a flat statement, empty of conviction. He leaned back, the bench creaking in protest.The movement shifted his massive gut, causing it to slump further into his lap. He looked down at it, his expression unreadable. He poked the side of his belly, watching the fat jiggle in a slow, gelatinous wave that traveled around his entire midsection.
“It’s just… it’s a lot,” Rigby murmured, almost to himself.
The silence stretched between them, filled only by the sound of traffic and their own labored breathing. The bags of food were empty, crumpled on the ground. The temporary relief was fading, replaced by the crushing reality of their bodies on that bench, too big for it, too big for their clothes, too big for the sidewalk.Mordecai knew they should get up. They should waddle back to the park, to the house, to the fridge with the remaining bottles. But the effort seemed Herculean.The leaden weight in his gut had fused with the bench.
He closed his eyes.Behind his eyelids, he saw the website.The bright, bold letters. REAL GAINS.REAL TRANSFORMATION. He saw the ‘Order Now’ button, a vibrant, pulsing red.
He opened his eyes, the neon promise fading back into the grainy reality of the damp sidewalk.A city bus rumbled past, its diesel exhaust bitter in the still air. He shifted, the plastic bench creaking a warning under the redistribution of his weight.“We should—”
The squeal of tires cut him off.
A black van, windowless and sleek, pulled to a sharp stop at the curb directly in front of them. The side door slid open with a heavy metallic clank before the vehicle had fully settled.Two men in dark, nondescript tactical gear unfolded themselves onto the pavement. Their movements were efficient, practiced, utterly silent.They wore black masks that obscured everything but their cold, focused eyes.
Mordecai’s mind, slowed by fatigue and confusion, simply froze.This wasn’t happening. Rigby made a small, choked sound beside him, his fingers digging into the soft fat of his own thighs.“Mordecai?Rigby?” the first man said. His voice was flat, devoid of inflection.
“Who’s asking?” Rigby blurted, a pathetic attempt at his usual bravado.It came out as a thin wheeze.
The second man stepped forward.“You need to come with us. Now.”
“No way, man,” Mordecai said, finding his voice, which sounded reedy and frightened even to him. He tried to stand up, a monumental task that required rocking his weight forward and heaving with his arms. “We’re not going anywhere.”
The first man moved. He grabbed Mordecai’s upper arm.His grip was like iron, but it sank deeply into the soft, unresisting fat of Mordecai’s bicep. Mordecai yelped, more from shock than pain.The man pulled, attempting to yank him upright.
It was like trying to lift a waterlogged sack. Mordecai’s body resisted, his center of gravity impossibly low, his mass suctioned to the bench by his own bulk. The man grunted, surprised by the sheer, inert weight.He planted his feet and pulled harder. Mordecai felt his soft flesh squelch and bulge around the man’s gripping fingers.A hot shame flushed through him.
“Get off me!” he shouted, thrashing his free arm. The swing was slow, weak, the limb thickened and heavy with fluid and fat.
The second man went for Rigby.Rigby reacted with panic, kicking out a stubby, swollen leg. The man easily caught it, hands sinking into the cellulite-pitted softness of Rigby’s calf. “He’s a fighter,” the man muttered to his partner, a note of clinical disdain in his voice.
“I’ll show you fighter!” Rigby screeched, but he was already being dragged, his sneakers scraping uselessly on the concrete.His round body, a sphere with little leverage, offered no anchor. He toppled off the bench with a wet, heavy thud, his gut flattening against the pavement with an audible whump that knocked the air from his lungs.
Mordecai was still half-on the bench, a beached leviathan.The first man had abandoned trying to lift him cleanly. He now shoved a shoulder into Mordecai’s soft, protruding side, grasping a handful of the loose, lard-filled flesh that spilled over Mordecai’s waistband. He hauled upward with a brutal, straining heave.
Mordecai felt his body deform under the assault.His flesh was not muscle; it offered no tensile strength. It simply compressed and oozed under the pressure, a horrifying sensation of utter corporeal vulnerability. He slid off the bench, his knees buckling instantly under the sudden, unsupported weight. He crashed down next to Rigby, a twin avalanche of quivering fat.
“What do you want?” Mordecai panted, his face pressed against the cool, gritty sidewalk.The world was a narrow strip of asphalt and black boots.No answer. The men worked quickly now, understanding the physics of their targets. They didn’t try to carry them. They each grabbed an arm and a vast, doughy section of torso, and began dragging them toward the open maw of the van.It was a slow, ugly process. Their bodies were dead weight, frictionless in their sweat-slicked state yet impossibly massive.
Mordecai’s torn tank top rode up, exposing the pale, stretched globe of his belly to the rough pavement.He felt every crack and pebble. Rigby was making a continuous, high-pitched whimpering sound as he was dragged, his round gut acting like a keel, turning him slightly sideways.At the van’s edge, the real struggle began. The threshold was a foot off the ground.The men strained, their breaths becoming ragged grunts. They tried to lift Mordecai head-first. His upper body rose slightly, but his stomach, a vast and pendulous counterweight, anchored him to the ground.It swung sickeningly.
“Grab his—just get a hold of anything!” one man barked.
Hands groped and clawed at the landscape of Mordecai’s body. They shoved under his arms, sinking into the soft moobs and armpit fat. They gripped the thick, cellulite-dimpled rolls of his love handles, heaving. For a terrible moment, he was suspended, a blubbery spectacle, his flesh spilling over the men’s forearms. Then, with a final, coordinated heave, they pivoted and dumped him into the van. He landed on the cold metal floor with a sound like a dropped side of beef.Rigby followed, a sobbing, struggling ball. The men rolled him unceremoniously up and in, his body folding reluctantly at the middle to accommodate the space. The door slammed shut, plunging them into absolute darkness. The engine roared, and the van accelerated, the motion rolling their soft, massive forms against each other in the dark.